Born: 7 February 1919, Myanmar
Died: 27 January 1998
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Harriet Edith “Edie” Van Horn
Automotive worker and trade unionist Edith Van Horn was born the daughter of Baptist missionaries in Myanmar’s largest city, Yangon, then known as Rangoon, Burma. Her family returned to the United States in 1926, and she went on to study art and philosophy at Denison University, graduating in 1941. She accepted a position as a graduate assistant to continue her education at Oberlin College, but her graduate studies were interrupted by the United States’ entry into World War II, and she began working on the assembly line for Goodyear Aircraft Corporation. She served on the committee for the union, LanoLocal 856, and later served as chief steward for Local 17 when she moved to Santa Monica California and took a job with Douglas Aircraft Corporation after being laid off from Goodyear in 1944 – possibly part of the wave of women forced out of their jobs by employers wanting to give those jobs to returning service men.
The following year, Van Horn returned to the Midwest, and began working at a Chrysler plant in Michigan, where she was elected chief steward for Local 3 in 1946. The first woman on Local 3’s Executive Board, she would hold that position until 1963, when she was appointed International Representative in the UAW’s Citizenship Department. She was elected as a delegate to the UAW constitutional convention multiple times. Even while laid off in 1958, she co-chaired Local 3’s Production and Skilled Workers Unemployment Committee.
Continuing her work with the UAW, Van Horn focused more attention on women and racialized minorities in the 1970s. She helped establish the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC) and was a charter member of the National Organization for Women (NOW), and the Detroit chapter of NOW named her Feminist of the Year in 1975. She and other union women organized the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) in 1973, with Van Horn serving as national coordinator.
Van Horn was also a member of the NAACP, worked on the Mondale-Ferraro presidential campaign (with Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman to be a major party’s vice-presidential candidate), served as chairwoman of the City of Detroit’s Task Force on Crime subcommittee on rape, and worked with the City Planning Commission on issues like flooding and abandoned houses.